What made In Moll a foundational record?
When Markus Guentner cut In Moll in 2001, Kompakt was still figuring out what its new Pop Ambient series was for. Guentner, a producer from Regensburg working in dub techno's slower, more melodic register, had already contributed to the label's inaugural Pop Ambient compilation. In Moll took that vocabulary, deep bass, spatial reverb, harmonies that unfold rather than repeat, and stretched it across a full album that critics and Kompakt insiders alike put next to Basic Channel's Radiance III and Wolfgang Voigt's GAS records as a genre high-water mark.
"We knew that we had found something outrageously beautiful," Kompakt co-founder Michael Mayer said of the record.
Voigt himself called Guentner "one of the first, but also one of the most important ambient artists" the label ever released.
What's actually different about the reissue?
This isn't a straight repress. Black Knoll Editions had Rafael Anton Irisarri, the producer and mastering engineer behind Black Knoll Studio in New York, remaster the entire album in full analog. More notably for collectors: "In Moll 4" never made the original 2001 vinyl. This edition, out November 6, presses it for the first time, restoring the track to the sequence it was written for. Alongside the original seven tracks, the release adds a newly reworked interpretation that Guentner recorded this year, revisiting the same material through 25 years of distance rather than simply cleaning up the old masters.
Why revisit instead of just reprint?
A straight repress would have sold fine on nostalgia alone. Pairing the restored original with Guentner's own 2026 reinterpretation treats In Moll as a living piece rather than a museum object. It's a small but telling signal about how the dub-techno and ambient-adjacent scene now treats its own canon: not frozen, but worth returning to with the ears you have now. The album releases November 6 on 2xLP vinyl (limited white and black pressings) and digitally, via Bandcamp.
